conversations and of the stories themselves, even when it is not to be
detected in the general character of the subjects.

And thus we can pretty well decide what is the most interesting and
important part of the whole subject. The question, What is the
special virtue of the _Heptameron_? I have myself little hesitation
in answering. There is no book, in prose and of so early a date, which
shows to me the characteristic of the time as it influenced the two
great literary nations of Europe so distinctly as this book of Margaret
of Angoulême. Take it as a book of Court gossip, and it is rather less
interesting than most books of Court gossip, which is saying much. Take
it as the performance of a single person, and you are confronted with
the difficulty that it is quite unlike that other person's more certain
works, and that it is in all probability a joint affair. Take its
separate stories, and, with rare exceptions, they are not of the first
order of interest, or even of the second. But separate the individual
purport of these stories from the general colour or tone of them;
take this general colour or tone in connection with the tenor of the
intermediate conversations, which form so striking a characteristic
of the book, and something quite different appears. It is that same
peculiarity which appears in places and persons and things so different
as Spenser, as the poetry of the Pléiade, as Montaigne, as Raleigh,
as Donne, as the group of singers known as the Caroline poets. It is
a peculiarity which has shown itself in different forms at different
times, but never in such vigour and precision as at this time. It
combines a profound and certainly sincere--almost severe--religiosity
with a very vigorous practice of some things which the religion it
professes does not at all countenance. It has an almost morbidly
pronounced simultaneous sense of the joys and the sorrows of human life,
the enjoyment of the joys being perfectly frank, and the feeling of